Health care, or healthcare, whichever term you prefer, is the prevention, intervention and management of sickness using the facilities offered by the medical, nursing and allied health professions. According to The WHO, health care embraces all the goods and facilities designed to promote health, including preventive, curative and palliative interventions, whether directed to individuals or to populations. The organized provision of such services may constitute a healthcare system.
Early on before the phrase healthcare was commonplace, the English speaking nations called it just plain medicine or more commonly the health sector but it still meant the provision of a health service to treat and cure sickness and disease. Even in most developing countries there is a form of health care provision for everyone whether they are in a position to pay or not. This first begun in the UK a few years after the end of World War 2 in 1948, and became the first healthcare service set up and run by a administration.
According to The World Health Organization, a good alternative to this system is that in Italy where insurance for health is a compulsory but is a government funded service and possibly the second best around the world. Other examples are Medicare in Australia, established in the 1970s by the Labour administration, and by the same name Medicare in Canada, established between almost twenty and 1984. The main countries that do not support this universal healthcare service are America and South Africa, although they are making reforms to their health service. Health care professionals are dedicated to preventing illness and disease primarily, but also to treat and protect the long term health of their patients.
Worldwide, over recent decades, there has been a huge increase in the amount of money spent on health care and it is now one of the fastest growing sectors in every developed country with an average cost of 10 percent of the gross domestic product. Although in 2003 the health care costs paid to across the entire health care system, consumed 15.3 percent of the GDP of America, the largest of any country in the world and is anticipated to reach almost twenty percent of GDP by 2016.
Currently in the United States over one hundred eighty million citizens are looking for healthcare and it will be no surprise to learn that it is top of all concerns for those in and seeking employment. The costs of health care in The United States have risen so much that General Motors had looked at filing bankruptcy due to the increasing health care costs wearing down its auto manufacturing division. Luckily it didn\’t happen after some concessions and compromises made with the unions but it does show how something like this can have an effect on even the largest of companies.
Health care has become an extremely important issue to Americans one which employers must address to a work force which demands better healthcare benefits. Perhaps the situation needs to be looked at from a different angle, one in which people are promoted to stay fit and healthy as societies in general see a decline in the health of its populations.
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